Stepping Into Sunlight

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After Penny Sullivan witnesses a shocking crime, her world tips sideways. Suddenly things like getting groceries, mowing the grass, and returning phone calls are more than she can handle. But with her husband away at sea and her seven-year-old son depending on her, hiding in the closet isn't an option. Hoping to recover by the time her husband gets home, she picks up her trusty yellow notebook and formulates a restoration plan: Do one kind thing for another person every day. The results are sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, and often brilliantly surprising...

"It's official--if the book says Sharon Hinck on the spine, I'm buying it!"--Kathryn Mackel, bestselling author


The Author

  1. Sharon Hinck

    Sharon Hinck

    Sharon Hinck is a wife and mother of four. She holds an MA in Communications from Regent University and spent ten years as the artistic director of a Christian performing arts group. She has played a variety of instruments, including college study of piano and...

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Reviews

"Penny Sullivan finds herself facing changes of a cross-country move and caring for a young son while her husband is deployed at sea as a Navy Chaplain. After she witnesses a violent crime and her life is threatened, she sinks into depression and despair. Having grown up with a brother who had mental illness, she feared she was becoming ill as well. This book gives a rare glimpse into the world of the clinically depressed and mentally ill and helps one to understand more fuly what they are going through. Ultimately Penny receives help through her long lost brother and an unlikely support group."
--DM, Libraries Alive

"Penny Sullivan teeters on the edge of a chasm. Out one side is her life as the wife of a Navy Chaplain and her role as super-mother of a young son; on the other stands a pale wreck, agoraphobic and defeated, clinging to any shred of the person she used to be, now 'buried beneath a granite slab of fear.' A trip to a convenience store placed her in the middle of an armed robbery, but the gun aimed at Penny jammed. Though the thief is still at large, Penny pushes the incident aside. She refuses to contact Victim Support, even when her husband is deployed and she is left alone in an unfamiliar town far from family and friends.

"Penny attempts to joke her way out of panic in supermarkets: 'What's next, fear of hula hoops?' She compiles a list of tasks: 'Join PTA--help out at school. Explore neighborhood.' Yet her efforts to be 'the old Penny' by the time her husband returns from his tour of duty fail: 'Images flashed around me like lightening. Blood pooling on cold linoleum. A gun swinging in my direction.' She ends up huddled in her closet until her child coaxes her out. At this moment, Penny's long journey of healing begins.

"If this were all the book had to offer, the author's language and pacing would be enough to carry it forward, but Penny confronts not only the fear prompted by her brush with death, she also discovers pockets of shameful judgments she holds about people. A neighbor she dismisses as ignorant teases her out of her shell and Penny both helps and receives help from the woman. A young member of Victim Support, who has multiple piercings and is in therapy for cutting herself to escape deep emotional trauma, touches Penny's heart. It is at this time that the 'old Penny' surfaces, and she shares a project she created for her own healing: 'to do something kind of a new person each day.'

"The group adopts 'Penny's project.' Her faith in God strengthens; she faces the underlying cause of her collapse: her brother had been treated for severe depression and had disappeared over a decade ago. Penny's greatest terror is that she inherited a strand of DNA that would put her in an institution or on the streets, a fate she fears happened with her brother. Shame accompanies this fear as she wonders why she has not tried harder to find him.

"With authority, Hincks, the author of The Secret Life of Becky Miller, depicts how agoraphobia cripples. Penny 'hand trims' her lawn rather than venture out to purchase gasoline for her mower. Further, Penny is not her old self when her husband returns. Scars remain, but the new Penny has evolved: 'My days had filled with small efforts, sometimes wrenched from the deepest places of my soul, but always guided and supported by God's hands.'"
--Carol Lynn Stewart, Fore Word, December 2008

"In this interview with Scott Noble of Noble Creative, Sharon Hinck, author of the new book Stepping Into Sunlight talks about developing characters and how questions of faith serve as central components in her stories. Hinck is the author of several books including the Becky Miller series (Bethany House) and the "Sword of Lyric" fantasy series (NavPress).

"MCC: Tell us about your new book Stepping into Sunlight.

"HINCK: It's about a Navy chaplain's wife, and she witnesses a violent crime right before her husband leaves on his first deployment. They've just moved across the country away from family and friends, because he has become a chaplain. So she is away from the support system she would normally have. she has this traumatic experience that kind of shakes her faith. And her husband that she loves so dearly is gone, and she's worried about his safety.

"She has a 7-year-old son and begins to suffer from symptoms of post traumatic stress. She doesn't recognize at first that this is what is going on. When she begins to realize that she is not snapping out of it or getting over it, she is very mad at herself; she is trying to muscle through this and doesn't thinks he should be letting it affect her. So she doesn't seek help right away. But eventually God begins to bring her help through some unlikely sources.

"MCC: How did the idea for this book come about?

"HINCK: All my stories start with a character that I just begin to explore. I began to have this sense of this really neat character named Penny. I liked her, but she was scared to leave her house, and I thought, 'Now why is that?'

"Then I realized, 'Oh, it's because of this crime she experienced.' But still most people can get over that. Why is it extra hard for her? 'Oh, it's because she has moved across the country.' But why has she moved? 'Oh, it's because her husband is in the Navy.'

"So little by little she kind of revealed to me what her story was and that's sort of how the stories come to me--starting with the character, and the questions about why they are the way they are.

"MCC: How did you get started writing?

"HINCK: I actually recently dug out some of my childhood journals and found where I had written, 'I dream that one day I might write a novel.' So it was really fun to find that. But I remember reading a children's book about Nellie Bly in third grade--one of the early women newspaper reporters--who went undercover into hospitals and insane asylums and the women's prisons and then did expose journalism. I remember when I read that story, I thought, 'Words are really powerful and people who write can change the world.'

"MCC: As an author, how did you see your faith interacting with your art?

"HINCK: It's the heartbeat of everything I write. I'm probably more overt about faith themes than some of my Christian friends who write novels. I think the spiritual journey of life is an epic adventure, so I love focusing on that with my characters. All of my characters do a lot of wrestling with questions of faith.

"MCC: When someone picks up your book and reads it, what do you hope they walk away with?

"HINCK: I just hope that they get a new glimpse of an aspect of God that maybe they didn't know before. Something about the way God loves them, something about the things God is calling them to--especially encouragement when the road is harder than they expected. I think that's the theme of all my novels.

"Most of the characters, most of the protagonists are Christians who are struggling to live out their faith and get hit with things they didn't expect. and they have to ask those questions of 'Where is God in the midst of it?' or 'How does He want me to respond?'

"MCC: What's next for you?

"HINCK: I have a couple of projects in the works that we'll just have to see where they land and what happens next. I'm still getting up each morning and trying to be available and beat the crows away that flap around my head saying, 'Who do you think you are to do this' and 'Nobody's interested anyway.' It's that daily battle, but I'm doing revisions on a novel right now that I hope to get to my agent soon."
--Minnesota Christian Chronicle, December 2008

"Hinck takes us on a journey through depression and back, but manages to show readers hope throughout. It's a little frustrating that we're not given insight into the traumatic incident until quite a long way into the book, but once all the details are known, the story is meaningful and significant.

"SUMMARY: Penny Sullivan is involved in a horrible situation right before her husband is due to be deployed for three months. She's left home alone to take care of their 7-year-old son, and many days, she finds it difficult to even go out of the house. Fear takes over, and depression seeps into every area of her life. But with help from a support group and a project she develops, Penny takes one small step at a time toward healing."
3 stars
--Melissa Parcel, Romantic Times Book Reviews, October 2008